Professor John Morrill, University of Cambridge

Project specialism: Rinuccini and the English Civil Wars

Professor Morrill has research interests across the period 1500-1750, and in many aspects of the period – religious, political, social and cultural. He has written more than a dozen articles in the past decade exploring the historical relationship between the peoples of England, Scotland, Ireland and Wales, most easily approached through his short book Uneasy Lies the head that wears a Crown: dynastic crises in Tudor and Stewart Britain 1504-1746 (2005) and in his Ford Lectures in Oxford in 2005, entitled Living with Revolution: the peoples of Britain and Ireland and the Wars of the Three Kingdoms which he is preparing for publication.

He is also deeply concerned about the religious dynamics of early modern British History, and especially about the religious psychology of leading actors in the events of the period, most notably Oliver Cromwell as can be seen in his biography of Oliver Cromwell (2007) and in many papers including forthcoming essays on Cromwell and the Bible and on Cromwell’s massacre of the garrison of Drogheda.

He is currently one of three senior scholars managing the preparation of an edition of the 3,600 depositions of witnesses to the massacres in Ireland in 1641 funded by Research Councils in the UK and in Ireland. He has been the Consultant Editor for 6,000+ seventeenth-century lives in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.